Are we a nation of workaholics?

Holidays left untaken, families left unseen, nerves left frayed...How do you
know when your vocation is becoming an addiction?

Photo: Stuart Patience/Heart Agency

By Will Storr

11:00AM BST 25 Oct 2013

The leader of the south-west London branch of Workaholics Anonymousis a 72-year-old architectural designer with two stents in his heart named George. When I call him, he's working. His living room is mostly taken up with a table cluttered with architecture books and business papers and an easel, scattered with drawings of some grand project with high windows and Doric columns.

I wait while he prepares my cup of tea. It takes a long time. I begin to feel uncomfortable. What's going on in there? Eventually, he reappears with a coffee for himself and a remarkably rich and delicious tea for me, served in a proper cup and saucer. The sugar arrives in a pot with a lid and its own silver spoon. George's absence was due to trying to make my drink perfect. He was *really working at it*.

This is a symptom of his condition, George tells me as he settles into a chair to tell me the story of his workaholism. Raised in a working-class neighbourhood of south Chicago, on leaving high school in 1960 he secured a coveted spot as an apprentice at RR Donnelley, a thriving printing company. One day, his friend Barry, a recruitment consultant, called him up: "George, I got a new job for you. This one's really great. It's sweeping floors in a wallpaper factory."

George wasn't impressed. "These apprenticeships are like gold dust," he told him. "But I need the commission," said Barry. "Just go over and see them." When George got to the wallpaper factory, he was offered the job. And he took it. "Barry was a great friend of mine and he needed the commission," George explains. "That's where the workaholism comes in.

One of the aspects is people pleasing." He worked hard and was soon promoted to the silk screen department. One cold November night, when he was 18, he was delivering an order when he had an experience that would change his life. "I'm walking back down Astor Place," he says, "and a car pulls over. It's a Cadillac limousine or a Rolls-Royce or something. The chauffeur gets out, he's liveried, and he opens the doors and these women inside are laughing.

"I just stood there, fascinated. I looked up and there's a butler with his tails on, opening the door of the house. There's a crystal chandelier. I was spellbound. I thought, 'This is how people should live.'" What exactly was it about the encounter that lit him up? "It was the grandeur," he says. "And the fact that you don't see any hurt in these people's lives. Any problem I had ever perceived of, these people obviously didn't have."

Electrified by the encounter, George decided to pursue this life himself, by studying interior design. Unfortunately, he didn't have the right qualifications for the course, so every day for a month, he went to the college after work to try to convince them to let him in. "This is another attribute of the workaholism," he says. "We have perseverance. We won't let go. And I certainly didn't." Eventually, the college relented.

George's academic interest shifted from interior to architectural design. During this period, he worked in the wallpaper factory from 7am until 3pm, went to school from 4.30 until 9pm, then did his homework until 1am. He also spent all Saturday at school. "I just wanted to learn, to achieve."

He later married a Yorkshire woman,moved to the UK, and set up an architecture firm. It became common for him to miss an entire night's sleep, relentlessly trying to solve work problems. He'd go on "work binges" of 35 hours. "Once I start working," he admits, "I cannot stop."

When George opened his branch of WA eight years ago, there were just two others in Britain. For the first three years, no one came.Today, there are seven groups across the country with a further three online, and between 18 and 22 men and women come to his hour-longThursday sessions to discuss the 12 Steps recovery programme made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous and share their troubles.

"They're from all walks of life," says George. "Grand scions of giant families and ne'er-do-wells. One thing they have in common is their attitude to work. They keep going." Does it ruin lives? "Yes. People have committed suicide. Their health has suffered. A great friend I met in the programme had a heart attack, and the day after held a board meeting in the hospital."

It's only within the past decade that behaviours, as opposed to drugs, have been judged potentially addictive. But there's no entry for workaholism in the "bible" of mental illness, theDiagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Most scientists agree gambling is addictive while others point to early research that indicates video games might also become compulsive. But the idea that work can be added remains controversial.

Some psychology studies have claimed as many as 10-20 per cent of the population is addicted to work. Others point out that some countries, such as Japan, have a "culture" of workaholism, in which 12-hour days are common, employees sleep in office bedrooms and holidays are spurned. There's even a name for death by overwork: karoshi. Even in the UK, ambitious young men and women in highly competitive industries work extreme shifts. Last August, 21-year-old Moritz Erhardt, a Bank of America Merrill Lynch intern, was found dead in his showerafter 72 hours in the office. His father believes he suffered an epileptic seizure triggered by exhaustion.

Japanese society encourages long office hours

For Prof Arnold B Bakker, chairman of the work and organisational psychology unit at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, workaholism is real and dangerous. "If you're successful, more people will ask you to do more things," he says. "Then the work piles up. You may start to do more than you originally intended, and that might develop into a behavioural pattern in which you engage in work when you don't really like it any more. You begin to work excessively hard. You become addicted. The result could be burn-out."

Some believers claim the ultimate result of work addiction can be a dark shift in personality, with the sufferer becoming drained of empathy and compassion.

"People who are addicted to work forget about other people," says Bakker. "They're egotistic and don't collaborate well, going for their own goals.They develop a tunnel vision. They become unable to deal with the fact that the world is not perfect."

Self-esteem based entirely on achievement can be dangerous. "If everything depends on it, it's a disaster if anything goes wrong." Breakdowns can be seen in highly demanding professions such as banking and the law. "If you're a top chef, you may get into a lot of trouble," adds Bakker.

That's a statement with which the head chef at London's The Square has no argument. Phil Howard, 47, holds two Michelin stars and is regarded as one of Britain's most consistently brilliant cooks. He led his first brigade at the incredibly young age of 24, having served time in that notorious kitchen, Marco Pierre White's Harvey's. "Harvey's has been called the SAS of kitchens," he says. "It was an extraordinary place to work. We'd be in at 7am until at least 1am six days a week. It was exactly the same when we startedThe Square. It was very much about relentless, incredibly hard work."

Like George, Howard had a catalyst moment. He knew he wanted to be a chef the moment he began cooking for himself as a student. "I don't know why it was so powerful," he says. "There's just this immense sense of direction and this unbelievably rampant appetite to progress. You've got to be the first in and the last out. It's the butch nature of kitchen life, which is changing a little bit - but it's still there."

In his mid-twenties Howard developed a drug problem. By 30 he was abusing crack, cocaine, cannabis and alcohol. "Addiction is complicated," he says, "but kitchen life put me on a fast track." His wife left him. After two stints in rehab, he realised he had to find more balance.

Today, with his family reunited, he works from 8am until 11pm and spends his free time with his family - and fellow competitors in marathons and triathlons. Howard appears to be an extremely high achiever, but does he necessarily have a mental illness? By calling him a workaholic, aren't we simply pathologising his personality?

Prof Mark Griffiths, a psychologist at Nottingham Trent University, believes just working long hours doesn't make you a workaholic. "I talk about the six components for addiction," he says. These are: salience (whether the behaviour dominates your life); mood modification (the behaviour reliably changes your mood); tolerance (you have to do more of the activity to achieve the same mood change); measurable withdrawal symptoms; conflict with other areas of your life; and relapse (you repeatedly revert to earlier behaviour after bouts of abstinence or control).

If an individual's behaviour features all six, says Griffiths, "I don't care what that behaviour is - I would define it as addiction." While agreeing the condition is real, he thinks the 10-20 per cent figure is inflated. "What those studies measure is preoccupation with work, which is entirely different. If that many people were truly addicted to work, we'd have a treatment centre in every city."

Others are yet more sceptical. "Addiction isn't cut and dried," says Prof Robert West, of University College London. "There are obviously people whose lives get ruined because they work too hard. One part of their brain is saying, 'Oh no, this is terrible, I want to keep my family,' but they get so much satisfaction from work that they override it. But that's the human condition, really."

Dr Luke Clark, a neuroscientist and behavioural addiction specialist at the University of Cambridge, doubts that workaholism will ever be seen as a genuine condition. "Addiction researchers tend to think of these things as an interplay between two factors," he says. "You've got vulnerabilities at the level of the person - that might be their genetic makeup, their brain structure, or personality traits such as impulsivity.

The other factor is how that drug or that gambling game, say, operates on the person. It might be the drug's pharmacology or the jackpot's size. But in the case of work, what that agent is, is vague to me. All you can really think about are the vulnerabilities at the level of the person." In other words, the potential highs that might be produced by a day's work do not equate to the highs that could be generated by the roulette wheel.

Back in Battersea, George's tasteful but modest terrace house suggests that, despite a lifetime of work, he isn't living the life of grandeur he glimpsed as a boy. Nevertheless, despite his heart surgery, two years ago, he still works 110-hour weeks. "When I heard that Winston Churchill worked and drank all night I thought, 'That's me.'

"Historically, a lot of the world's problems have been solved by people not stopping. That's my category." George identifies himself as a workaholic and admits it's caused problems. He's undergone the 12 Steps and yet he seems to be toiling as relentlessly as ever - and be perfectly happy about it. So why bother with treatment? Before he did the 12 Steps, he explains, he'd push on all night tofind a solution to an intractable problem. But today, he knows it's better to wait and, sooner or later, an answer will materialise.

So what does he do with all the free hours his new attitude has given him? "Now that I have it, I use that extra time," he grins. "I fill it with work."